


More Him Than Myself

by WatchMyFavesSuffer



Category: Call Me By Your Name (2017), Call Me By Your Name - All Media Types, Call Me by Your Name - André Aciman
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe- set in US, Alternate Universe- they're black, Bisexual Character, Gay, Gay Male Character, M/M, Pining, Slow Burn, afro-pessimism, critical race theory
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-06
Updated: 2020-09-01
Packaged: 2020-09-02 18:57:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 8,630
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20250181
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WatchMyFavesSuffer/pseuds/WatchMyFavesSuffer
Summary: "A song, then. A ballad for my sometime- and always-lover."So, one of my favorite things about CMBYN is the ethno-religious belonging Elio finds with Oliver, their sense of solidarity in being Jewish people in a Christian setting, and the ancient and powerful mysticism that their shared background adds to their love. That being not my lived experience, I decided to write about my own ethnic and religious *gestures vaguely* ...stuff as a black man. And, you know, write about sex acts involving peaches and the deep intimacy of true love.So without further ado, I present the story of 18 year old Malcolm and his love for a philosophy student named Johnathan who comes to stay with Malcolm's family at their vacation home in Oaks Bluff, Massachusetts.





	1. Chapter 1

A song, then. A ballad for my sometime- and always-lover

It began in a house by the sea. Our summer home, a three-story colonial: yellow paint, whitewash on the windowsills and verandas. The dormer window with its silk upholstered seat, where I sat as I watched his feet crunch the gravel on his way to our door. The first thing I came to like about him was the way the darkness of his skin jumped out at me against the yellow of our walls.

He was my parents’ houseguest for the summer. They took in a different academic each year, to assist my dad with his research, work on their own scholarship, and get to know the summertime residents of Oaks Bluff. This summer, a graduate student in philosophy from NYU. His name was Johnathan. Though he was only 21, he was writing his first book, a fact that intimidated me before I ever met him. He would inhabit the only other bedroom on the top floor, right down the hall from me, but would probably spend most of his stay in my father’s study.

“Malcolm!” My mother shouted up the stairs. “He’s here!” I left my place in the window and took the stairs two at a time.

His skin was the cool, loamy color of freshly turned earth, and plenty of it was on display: his striped linen shirt was unbuttoned almost halfway, his shorts showed a sliver of thigh. “Let me take your bags,” I said, and he shrugged, his manner easy and summery, as if to say that it did not much matter to him who carried what just as long as we were headed to the beach some time soon.

As I lugged his suitcase (he carried its matching duffel bag) through the first floor to the back stairs, I vaguely pointed to the various rooms. “Kitchen, dining room, living room, study. That’s the door to the garden,” I turned around and pointed in the direction of the front door. “And fifty yards away—“

“Inkwell Beach,” he finished for me. “The bedtime story for upwardly mobile black families.” His sarcasm: the second thing I liked. He delivered it without the sting of implied reproach; his humor always came with his broad smile and the implied invitation to laugh along with him. He wasn’t wrong, either. Oaks Bluff, with its Kennedy sightings and old whaling boats and white parties, was the ultimate status symbol and safe haven for affluent black families.

I took him up the two flights of stairs to his room. Wicker chair with soft blue upholstery, queen sized bed with matching pillows, end table, reading lamp, window facing the back garden: all the familiar articles with which I had played and watched and read in my childhood, that would be his for a season and come to mean entirely different things to him than they did to me. “And this is your room,” I said, extending my arms in an exaggerated gesture of welcome, then regretting it and dropping my hands to my sides. “I’m right down the hall.” I added, uncomfortable with his watchful silence.

His eyes were too dark to tell iris from pupil, and luminous enough to light the whole island of Martha’s Vineyard. I couldn’t bring myself to make eye contact and instead stole glances for as long as I could whenever he looked away. I silently promised myself I would do anything to make his eyes alight upon me, he so intimidated and impressed me.

“You’ll be here long enough to see the Illumination” I added, referring to the celebrated lantern festival that happened each year. I also knew, however, that _illumination_ was a word that would now forever call to mind his eyes and the way the glowed blackly.

“The capital-I Illumination. Very pagan.” He said, managing to make the remark, which had the potential to make me feel sheepish and embarrassed of my silly, privileged life and my childhood traditions, into witty banter rather than a biting critique.

Feeling I was in on the joke, and thus that we were on more intimate terms, I plunged on. “Almost everyone will be at the beach this afternoon. If you want to meet the neighbors.” I tossed the second sentence out casually, so he would know I wasn’t inviting him out for _my_ benefit, but rather was performing my duties as host and liaison to the youth of the island. I didn’t know when I decided, but I felt I both had to make him like me and had also to let him know that I didn’t care what his opinion of me was. All this from a few sentences and the flash of skin on his thighs.

“Cool,” he said noncommittally, not even bothering to look at me. It crushed me completely.

He found me in my room a few minutes later. In an almost-conciliatory tone, he said. “I’d actually like a tour of the neighborhood, if you’ve got the time.”

So I led him past the beach into town: the inns, the bed and breakfasts, the shops and restaurants, the famous gingerbread-style houses in their fairy tale colors, all the way down to the docks where the rental boats and gleaming yachts bobbed their heads quietly. I pointed out the historic buildings, the restaurants I knew had the best brunches, and, knowing this might be my only chance to speak to him at length in a household where everyone was always trying to get the last word, tried to smuggle into the conversation as much discussion as possible of our favorite books, movies, plays, paintings, all the things that might have made up his inner life, so I could compare mine to his and see what made him so intimidating and so promising to me.

We stopped and sat at a table, nursing sweet teas and overlooking the surf.

“So other than sing-alongs and lantern lightings, what do you do around here?”

“Well, someone’s always throwing a dinner party, or renting out the back of a restaurant for dancing. There’s swimming at Inkwell or at Jetty Beach. My parents invite guests nearly every evening. And I suppose, for most people my age, summer means playing squash, or tennis, or volleyball.”

“Well, you’re not most people your age.” He said as he lit a cigarette. My cheeks flamed hotter than his lighter. He leaned forward and asked, mock-conspiracy in his lowered voice, “What do we bookish, academic types do to pass the long, hot summer weeks?”

“Read, paint, eat ice cream. Work on dissertations in a dreary study all day,” I teased drily. He grinned.

“Touché.”

“What _is_ your book about?” I tried to both challenge and tease him and, while still indicating that I was genuinely interested, hoping to sound impersonal in my curiosity so he wouldn’t read into it any desire to know more about him as a person.

“It’s sort of a bore to explain.” His dismissiveness stung me. His eyes lost their glow and wore a flat, disinterested malice.

“Well, don’t let me bore you.” I tried to make it sound like a joke, but I knew I had snuffed out the small spark of camaraderie that had bloomed between us. 

He laughed half-heartedly. “I should get back to your folk’s place and unpack,” he said, looking beyond me to squint at the flaming, jagged line of the horizon.

I kicked myself mentally. _Should have quit while I was ahead._

So we walked back to the house in relative silence. He could tell I was brooding, and made an attempt to buoy my spirits, not wanting to alienate the only child of the house on his first day. He inquired after what I planned to study in college, and if NYU was on my list, or Wesleyan, where he had completed his undergrad. Chit-chat.

Something in me germinated and bloomed, unbeknownst to its host. Something which had already gone much, much too far before I realized what it was. The need to impress him, the envy I bore for the luster of his skin, the fascination I had with the magic of his words and smiles: it all added up to that squirming, many-tentacled thing we call desire.


	2. Chapter 2

Our dinner guests that evening were a legal scholar and her husband, a Spanish ex-pat. Jonathan surprised me with how open and jocular he could suddenly be, not to mention the facility with which he flipped from English to Spanish and back again. I saw my parents’ delight— he was lively, engrossing, a rapt active listener— but I also saw that he was putting on a show. He was conscious of how long he appeared to search for the right word before speaking, which betrayed to me that he knew the precise word all along. He added special flourish to certain questions; he feigned less-than-complete knowledge about the wine my parents drank, or a particular legal precedent, to make his interlocutor feel all the more knowledgeable. He saw the way I watched him and, knowing I had figured him out, added an even more exaggerated curiosity to his next question— to acknowledge I was right and to elicit laughter, which I smothered in my dessert, a coconut panna cotta made our cook, Gladys, a Haitian woman who knew everyone’s story and who lived in town with her husband.

As much as his prickliness by the docks had lowered me, the near-telepathy of our game picked me right back up.

He invited me to play tennis with him the next day, between breakfast and his duties in my father’s office. I (and my mother, who couldn’t help but interject) warned him I had no ability for any sport more complex than air hockey, but he insisted. I lost, of course, but the invitation gave me hope that our friendship was coalescing into something more solid. When returning an errant ball to him, I saw a chance to joke around.

I bowed deeply in the Elizabethan style. He completed the joke before I could.

“‘Tennis-balls, my liege.’” He intoned, catching my Shakespeare reference, which I hoped was not too pedestrian to impress him. “But it looks like you’re the one who’s court is disturbed with chases, my guy.”

“Your jest will savor but of shallow wit,” I said, then stuck my tongue out at him with faux-petulance before jogging back to my side of the net. I was in paradise.

I spent most of the game not watching the ball, but the elegant lines of his limbs, that promised to be soft and fresh as petals should I ever get the chance to touch them.

His hands were night-sky dark, and when he turned them over, it revealed the tender pink of his palms, a guarded, innocent blush that I would have died to kiss. He was full of surprises like that. Not just the suddenness of his smile, or the way each shift of light revealed the secret colors and angles and shadows of his body, but in all things. He was with us for weeks, for example, before he told us he was a classically trained dancer. My mother was thrilled with this discovery, and elicited groans from me when she asked if he could dance, just a bit, for us. He was a good sport, and completed with a self-mocking smile a small combination. I loved the way his body moved, its effortless rearranging into delicate lines. I had to pretend it had not affected me, when I was nearly in tears as he flowed like something liquid and sparkling through a double pique and when his foot brushed through first into a grande battement. The lines of his leg told me more about him, was more honest, than any conversation we could ever have. It was instinctual and almost childlike in the simple joy the movement brought him. 

I had never seen such a radiant body, one that made me so acutely aware of my own, both in the animal way it responded to his nearness, and in reminding me how beautiful his was compared to mine.

It was possible that what I read as the ease a beautiful person had with himself was a byproduct of how at home he felt with black folks. My school back at home was white, my debate team, my art classes. Only during the summer or when I happened to see my extended family was I surrounded by my own people. Even Oaks Bluff was surrounded on all sides by the other, lily-white neighborhoods of the Vineyard. While he moved in academic circles in New York, and so had gotten used to code-switching and self-censorship, he had been raised in an all-black neighborhood in Miami. We both spoke multiple languages, but the ones he knew— Creole, Spanish, some Yoruba— were flush with promises of some ancient kinship.

He taught me I could be less guarded, but also implicitly made me feel ashamed of how afraid I had been my whole life. On special occasions, he wore his grills, or cooked a meal for us that made our whole house smell more like home. He was an expert when it came to food, and hit it off with Gladys, chatting with her in Creole and laughing as he chopped bunches of cilantro for her.

Everyone loved him. My cousins and aunts and uncles who came for dinner, our nightly guests, my parents. Me.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this took so long!! I've gotten a much better idea of where the plot is going; I promise more regular updates will come!


	3. Chapter 3

We fell into a routine before long. I claimed a spot in the garden, where I sketched and read and avoided writing college essays. He sat with us for breakfast most days, or else would head into town for a run or a swim or an espresso and head straight to my father’s study when he was done. After he spent an hour or so sifting through my father’s disorganized papers for his new book about the American frontier and liminal space, Johnathan would head to the garden and put on headphones and work. He wrote with cheap drug store pens, blue ink, despite the fact that he had brought a Montblanc with him. The headphones would often kill all conversation, unless I threw a pen at him to catch his attention, or if he got frustrated and removed him headphones, flopping on his back and sighing, eyes closed against the sun as we spoke. I often asked him what he was listening to. The answer was just as often Public Enemy as it was Schubert’s fantasies. My parents didn’t go in for hip-hop, being more brunch-and-Billie Holliday types, which made his affection for it all the more alluring to me.

He did eventually tell me what his book was about. He knew he would have to perfect an elevator pitch for it anyway, what with our nightly guests who loved nothing more than grilling our residents about their scholarship. His work was, I was shocked to learn, an afro-pessimist critique of reason.

“You’re an afro-pessimist,” I half-asked, half-stated. He nodded. “A pessimist. And on a day like today.” 

My response was meant with some degree of irony, but I still wondered how the sun, the grass, the roar of the sea nearby could possibly run parallel with his conviction that nothing could improve for us. Or, I should say, I wondered  _how could you think such a thing, when you lay here and I lay here beside you, and when we are together I am home, and we are safe, and there is not a thing in one of us that the other wouldn’t understand? _

“Trust me, the irony of writing this while I sleep in your house, which costs more than everything I own, is not lost on me. But if that’s your critique, you’re missing the point.” 

I raised my eyebrows. Socratic irony.

“How we came to be here is no accident of history, just ask your namesake. The problem is that no one has ever loved us. Not even—especially not—us. ”

_No one has ever loved us_ _._ I rolled the sentence around in my mind. While the truth of it registered immediately with me, I still wondered at how someone so handsome, so good, so  _lovable_ could ever feel the cold wrath of an unloving world. 

After he worked in the garden, we had lunch, usually at home, sometimes in town (I hated these days, because he never went with us and instead headed out with friends, or stayed inside and worked). Then he would work another few hours in my father’s study (which my mother assured him was not necessary, work on your  _own_ book, go get some  _sun_ .) and then go back to his own work until dinner. After dinner, unless it was a rainy day, he would head out and go dancing, or to the beach, or the movies.

He spent most of his time not with me, but with the youth of Oaks Bluff, who I’d known casually for years and who logically should have been my friends before they were his.

It didn’t anger me, or make me jealous, that he was so popular. Whatever he may have shared with others, I was sure I had looked more deeply into him and had found more to love than anyone else on earth. 


	4. Chapter 4

I had always been a sickly child, a fact that I blamed for my inability to play most sports, and also for the vague sense of unease I felt toward my body, as though I never quite knew what to expect from it. So I inevitably caught a bad cold that summer, and Johnathan took the opportunity to show me how his family had dealt with colds since time immemorial. I, fever-delirious and draped in a fuzzy grey blanket, followed him down the stairs. “Did you put on some Vaporub?” he asked, looking at me askance. 

I rolled my eyes. “I may be an bougie professor’s son, but I’m still black.” 

He smiled his  touché smile. “Well then, you just need a shot of rum and bowl of chicken soup.” 

I raised my eyebrows at the idea as he poured the shot with barman-like finesse. “My father’s Trini. Swears by it.” He assured me. 

I took the bracing shot and tried not to grimace. He laughed at me anyway, and set about making chicken soup. He cooked, improbably, the way he danced. The same youthful exuberance, the same smooth, instinctual movements. He chatted with me idly—but while most of the time, chit-chat with him made me feel like he was just speaking to me out of want of a better conversational partner, he seemed to be enjoying my sleepy gambits and diversions about things of little importance. The air grew sweet and pungent with garlic; he was making his own  sofrito from scratch. His quick, lovely hands chopped while he turned his head to face me and throw me a smile at some dumb joke or other. The chicken breast sizzled as he laid it in the pan.

“That’s for dinner. In the meantime, how do you like French toast?”

I hadn’t yet opened my mouth (to say I liked it very, very much, so long as it was made by him, for me, in this kitchen during this perfect summer) when he had turned around and begun looking for a loaf of brioche. 

It had been easy, when the air between us was glacial and I wanted to resent him, to recast his insistence on playing chef as yet another way he showed off. Now, when it was clear he wanted, simply, to  give,  I regretted every uncharitable thought I had ever had toward him. When he cooked, he always insisted on paying for the ingredients he needed, despite the fact that we knew his funds were not exactly limitless. He would also often go to the store for butter or onions and return with ice cream he thought my mother might like or basil that looked so bright and smelled so good he simply  had  to make pesto for us. 

He presented me with French toast, crispy-edged with just a little bit of cinnamon on top. I bit into it and almost moaned involuntarily. 

“What did you put in this?” I asked, mouth still full.

“Guava paste and cream cheese. Do you like it?” 

Maybe what he meant was,  _do you like me?_

I nodded furiously.

After a few days of subsisting on his soup and trudging around the house shivering and griping, I awoke to find I felt better. I also found that Johnathan, who had grown sick of playing nurse, had decided to join a gym in town and now spent his time before breakfast, which used to be _my_ time before breakfast, trying to rebuild strength in the knee that had been battered by his time in ballet. When he was home, he worked diligently, or else fixed me with that blank, disinterested look that made me hate him all the more for being so giving, so good, and yet not realizing what  _I_ was willing to give to  _him_. I felt hopelessly indebted to him and at the same time wanted nothing to do with him or his reminders of how little I had to offer him. I had my photography, and my sketches of his heroes (hasty pencil drawings of Fred Hampton, Labi Siffre), and my voice, which had mostly been leant to school choirs and which I knew he liked from the way his pen stopped scratching for once when I sang “Les Fleurs” as I loaded the dishwasher. 

His white basketball shorts became the color of mud and grass. He became the landscape and the landscape became him. I couldn’t look at anything beautiful that summer without thinking of him. A white butterfly traced its tipsy path around a flowering yellow bush; the surf brushes its gentle dog-tongue lap against the dinghies; all the rhythms that had informed my sensory universe each summer now reminded me of him. The butterfly was the softness of his eyelashes as they fluttered in his sleep; the water was the rise and fall of his breath. 

The sea salt that permeated everything in this town— would I taste it on his skin? Or the musk of the study where he spent his afternoons, all old-book sweetness? Or some other taste, lovelier still than anything I had yet known? 


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm using this quarantine as an opportunity to revive some old pieces of writing. This is just a short chapter, but I hope y'all enjoy!

Just as suddenly as we had stopped speaking, we began again.

“How come you never hang out with us after dinner?” He asked, _us_ being his quickly and effortlessly adopted friends. He was laying in front of our small garden pond as the sun baked the side of his face that was turned to the sky. I was reading Camus and lazily drawing the toes of my left foot through the dew-drenched grass.

“It’s ‘us’ now? _Quel_ socialite!”

“Whatever, man. For real, how come you never go dancing, or to the movies? You’ve been to the beach maybe twice since I got here.“

I shrugged. “I have my books, the garden. I don’t need to go out with lots of people.”

“Don’t need to or don’t want to?”

“Everyone _wants _to have friends. I’m just not a very appealing option, it would seem.”

“I find that hard to believe.” He wore a funny half-smile. Was he teasing me? Was this a generic response to what could easily be construed as fishing for a compliment?

“Well, use your imagination.” I was being too gruff, I knew, but my gruffness was the mask I pulled over my embarrassment, embarrassment at how shy, how awkward and sniveling I was in comparison to him, with his wide breezy smiles and irresistible charisma.

He had revealed cracks in his unshakeable self-confidence, although I hadn’t seen them at the time. At the beach one evening, I was taking pictures of everyone. I brandished my camera towards him and he shied away, throwing his arms over his face, shielding himself from the unblinking eye of the shutter.

“Nah, man, I hate having my picture taken.”

“You’ve just never met anyone who did it right,” I retorted. I had assumed he was just blowing me off as usual. But maybe he genuinely hated having his picture taken. I tried to treat his face with the tenderness any art object deserves; I had him turn toward the sea, so the waning light shone rosy on his skin. I made sure no part of him was lost in shadow. 

He leaned over my shoulder to watch the Polaroid develop. “Well, it’s better than any yearbook photo. Thanks, man.” He clapped me on the shoulder. His tone was jocular, light and casual, but his voice was strained. Had I upset him? _He _said_ he doesn’t want his picture taken. For God’s sake, learn to quit while you’re ahead— _

Or was he—and this was too much to wish for—moved by how I saw him?

And another incident— this time on the beach early in the morning when he persuaded me to go comb through the tide pools with him. When the silence between us swelled for a moment, I grew anxious and scrambled for some new topic.

“What was it like growing up in the most chaotic state in the nation?” I asked, attempting to tease him.

“The place in itself? A paradise. The palm fronds, the sudden thunderstorms, the sky—so wide and so close, pressed against the low ground like a wax seal.”

“And the people _in_ the state?”

He let out a long exhale. “_That_ is different story entirely.” Helooked down at the opalescent shell between his fingers. “Let’s just say you can be dark skinned, you can be an aspiring ballerina, but you can’t be both. At a certain point, you’re just asking for trouble.”

I tried to imagine him in high school, and all I could picture was strong, dark limbs and the emergence of his strong jaw and high cheekbones. How anyone could have tormented him, or been anything but awed by him, baffled me.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“‘Salright.” His voice was strained again, but this time he looked at me directly. The intensity of his eyes—_Illumination_, my heart whispered—was almost too much to take.


	6. Chapter 6

These were golden days. Unsatisfied with my insistence that I didn’t need friends, he dragged me everywhere. The beach, doubles tennis, the one bar in town that didn’t card, biking along the more tree-shaded avenues. He stuck around for breakfast every day, and we would sit at the table long after everyone else had left and begun their days in earnest, talking about nothing, arguing about philosophy. 

My friendship with him wasn’t tainted by my attraction to him, no matter how often I felt I had to physically hold myself back from kissing his palms or caressing his face. I hadn’t a hope in the world that he could ever want me back, and the hopelessness was comfort. It helped to snip the sprouted bud of my anxiety when he drew near to me or laughed at something I’d said. It blunted the dread that knifed me when I saw him smile slyly at or compliment Aisha. 

I’d known Aisha ever since her family bought their house in Oaks Bluff. She was short and lithe and wore overalls and long, silken box braids. She had a sarcastic smile and frequently wore those cheap drugstore temporary tattoos, of popsicles or unicorns or roller skates. She was whip-smart, headed to Howard come August, and beautiful. Johnathan followed her around, but she was not easily won. He would buy her an ice cream, “so you’ll have to talk to me at least until it melts” and she would sit on a table, one brown leg dangling, and roll her eyes. 

“You’re so corny,” she would say as she licked her way around a vanilla soft serve with rainbow sprinkles. 

But I didn’t mind that he clearly liked her—I didn’t feel like a third wheel. Maybe because I had known her so long, I felt that he was joining with my past, my community, the memories of my every summer before I’d met him. Maybe because she was so unimpressed with him, or because I could remember when she had been in braces and her hotcombed hair hung in plaits with big plastic barrettes on the end. 

I basked in every second with him, gloried in the way Aisha would shoot me a look—  _ can you  _ believe _ him? _ —when he tried to ask what she planned to major in, or ask if she had a boyfriend back in New Jersey. 

But then again, maybe I was lying to myself. Or maybe I was letting the fact that watching him flirt—no matter with whom—turned me on cloud my judgement, because I found myself surreptitiously tallying up points in my favor or hers, trying to divine which of us was closer to him. She had no interest in philosophy— she loved pure mathematics, theoretical physics, R&B music, and not much else. Point: Malcolm. I tripped all over myself whenever I spoke to him, got lost in the tangle of my own limbs half the time. She was graceful and sexual, panther-like when she casually danced against him. Point: Aisha. 

Then there was the incident with the pencils—oh, the pencils. 

We were working in the garden after taking a quick swim. He flopped down on the grass in his bathing suit, marking pages with his blue pen, shirtless and slowly drying in the sun. I dropped my sketchbook and my things on my chair and headed upstairs to change into a dry clothes. When I emerged again, each and every one of my pencils was sharpened to a fine point. I hadn’t remembered sharpening them. I looked over to Johnathan, who was immersed in his work, but seated in a slightly different spot than the one I had left him in. 

I waved a hand to get his attention. He shifted his headphones off of one ear.

“Johnathan. Did you—did you sharpen my pencils for me?”

He shrugged. “They were getting dull, and I was tired of proofreading.” 

I was speechless. He— who had given every indication of being indifferent to my devotion to him, of preferring the company of others and merely settling for mine, and of being so constantly busy that he never stopped looking for something exciting to divert his attention—had taken each of my pencils between his nimble fingers and sharpened them to identical points. 

The kindness in the simple gesture overwhelmed me. Point: Malcolm. Scratch that. All the riches of heaven and Earth, all I had ever wanted from him, from any other man: Malcolm.

Then one day, as breakfast lingered on, we were bantering back and forth about Hegel, about the dialectic and whether contradiction was inherent to thought. He was eating toast with raspberry jam as we talked.

I was making some joke about the state and political subjectivity, when the sound of chewing stopped. I looked up and he was staring at me, a slightly amused twinkle in his eye. He had, I was delighted to note, toast crumbs on his lips. I imagine licking them from his skin, the faint taste of raspberry I would find there. I let him look at me, meeting his gaze until it became unbearable. I looked down, then flicked my eyes back up through my eyelashes.

He stood up a trifle straighter and wiped the crumbs from his mouth haphazardly. “You’re really something, Malcolm, aren’t you?” He was almost smiling, but not quite. That near-smile told me this wasn’t a casual compliment, nor a backhanded way of saying I was odd. It meant something bigger than he was letting on, something about the ways in which he saw into me, or maybe through me, the way he understood the thoughts I had yet to put my voice to. 

That was the cruelest thing he’d ever done to me—he gave me hope when I had reveled in having none. 


	7. Chapter 7

I couldn’t quite pinpoint when, but less than halfway through his time with us, I realized that Aisha and him had definitely—to borrow a phrase at once too vague and too pointed—_done it. _

My father unsubtly grinned at him at the breakfast table when he appeared, sleep deprived and still in yesterday’s clothes, to eat with us. My mother stayed quiet to maintain a façade of disapproval, but secretly I suspected she was relieved— a brother who not only quoted Shakespeare, but danced _ballet_? She hadn’t expected to catch him sneaking around with any _girls_, that’s for sure.

If everyone else was pleased for him, I certainly couldn’t show any misgivings about his late-night visits with Aisha.

Still, I didn’t trust myself to talk about her with him, not after the pencils, and the conversation over toast, not when I had just begun to hope for something more from him.

But of course, I should have known better than to trust in a half-smile and a bouquet of sharpened pencils by. Even if I could get him to love me, trust me, find me indispensable, I couldn’t make him want me. And, my mother’s assumptions about his love of ballet, I wasn’t sure he wanted it at all, that unspeakable it, and for all I knew the thought of me in his bed disgusted him beyond words.

However naïve or foolish my hopes I had been, it still hurt to see them dashed so unceremoniously. I feared the twist of my lips if he were to say her name around me, and the stutter of my heart and redness of my cheeks if he left me to go see her. Better to avoid him.

I threw myself into my college essays just to have an excuse to stay holed up in the house, and to give my eyes a place to rest where I wouldn’t find his gleaming darkness glaring back at me.

I hadn’t realized we were alone in the house until I looked up from my electric typewriter to see him in my doorway.

“Everyone’s playing volleyball down at the beach.”

“I’m no good at it.”

“Yeah? Me neither.” He picked up some ceramic knickknack I had sculpted in an art class years ago, slowly traced his fingers over the glaze-slippery surface.

“Is Aisha at the volleyball game?”

“Hm? Oh, probably. How should I know?”

“You don’t have to be coy. You know, you could have told me you liked her. I would have put in a good word.”

He arched an eyebrow. “I’m a big boy, I can make friends by myself.”

I shrugged and made a noncommittal noise. I turned back to my typewriter, but couldn’t think of anything to type besides _illumination_ and _striped shorts over dark thighs_ and _fingers slipping down ceramic._

“Do _you_ like her?”

“Sure I like her. I’ve known her since we were kids.”

“You know that’s not what I mean.”

I looked up at him. Was that what he thought this was? Jealousy? I could hardly believe my luck. I tried to smuggle a look of repressed vulnerability into my eyes, the look of someone who’s sore spot had been touched but didn’t wish to show it.

“You could have told me.” I shrugged again, trying to look wounded but stoic.

He picked up a piece of carbon paper from the table, an early draft of an essay for Princeton. He scanned a few lines, still turning the small ceramic vessel over in his right hand absently as he read.

“This prose isn’t half-bad, you know. Any interest in ghostwriting for me?” He grinned down at the creased, pencilled paper.

“I think I have to pass on that tempting offer, but thanks.” I wasn’t sure what to do with my hands. I admired how his were always busy, and how beautiful they were in motion.

“You don’t have to stay here if you don’t want. You can go down to the beach and see her. I’ll be fine.”

“And I can’t entice you to join us?”

“The essays beckon,” I said with a sad, wry smile. (Overkill? Perhaps.)

I pretended to adjust the paper in my typewriter as I listened to his footsteps, sprightly and unbothered (by silly professor’s sons or their silly crushes, by my presence or absence), down the stairs and out the door.

I picked up the ceramic he’d been playing with, a miniature coral-pink vase, trying to trace my fingers along the exact path his had taken. Had I really convinced him Aisha was the one I wanted? And if I had, had that put to bed any suspicions he might have had about me? Was that even what I wanted, to have my desires be unknown and unknowable? Even to him, who seemed so able to see right into my thoughts and unravel them? I put the vase back in the spot where he’d left it and wandered through the house.

I grabbed a white peach from the kitchen, pale and soft, blushing in spots the same coral as the vase. It was a cheap schoolboy joke, that peaches looked like asses, but the firm, round fruit made my mind run straight back to him, and his ass in those white tennis shorts. I tongued the fuzzy outside, nuzzling it with my lips and letting the smell fill my nose. Before I knew what I was doing, I was in his room.

It was sick, but I was already in motion by the time my conscience awoke. The peach, his sheets, his smell, the coral of the vase and the coral of the fruit, my finger overlapping the ghosts of his fingers, my body in the shadow of his body. My thought began to spin until, centrifuge-like, my body and his body drew closer and closer in my mind, until we collided, or overlapped like photo negatives, or merged into one dark, glowing, peachy-soft body. I was aching-hard as I buried myself in his sheets, inhaling his scent of lotion and warm, salt-sprayed muscle. I turned my face into his pillows, struggling not to moan as I grasped at handfuls of linen.

I wanted, terribly, to stay ensconced in his bed until the sensations overwhelmed me and I came. Came in his sheets, which were my sheets when we had no guests, that peach in my mouth like his body, my legs splayed like his in sleep. Had he ever come in this bed? And was it possible my lust followed the same patterns as his, as my body followed in his shadow? I imagined the peach pulp pooling on my chest, sticky and mingling with my come, the slick pit in my mouth as I sucked the flesh away. If he found me in that moment, so be it. Whether he licked the peach from my fingers or ran away or even told my parents—so be it. Let him see. Let them all see how I wanted him, not just to have but to be one with, to cross over his boundaries and bleed into him.

I forced myself to get out of his bed, and walked to my room to finish. As I cleaned up, the shame sank in. How desperately I wanted him, how shamelessly I had let my body do whatever secret things it craved the moment I was away from watchful eyes. And, cresting higher and meaner than the shame was the sadness, the profound _lack_ of him, and the knowledge he was probably in her arms as I hastily wiped come from my chest.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I also edited the last chapter bc it felt a touch Inside Baseball with the philosophy jargon. Let me know what you think of the change?


	8. Chapter 8

I wanted to repeat my performance in the bed, not just the next day, but every subsequent day. I, without realizing it consciously, counted the paces from his room to mine, from his bed to a closet where I could hide if caught in the act. Even thinking such thoughts was dangerous, left me far more vulnerable than I wanted. I culled each thought as soon as it sprung high enough to catch my attention. I reminded myself of the hangover of shame and loss I had felt after I came, feeling sticky and cheap and overexposed, and horribly empty without him. I reminded myself, too, that he had found someone, was probably with her right now, or thinking of her when he was with us at the breakfast table. But just the openness, the vulnerability of his open door and his empty bed, tempted me. My every nerve ending fired wildly, wanting his skin, his sheets, peach fuzz—any surface he had touched and loved—to touch me, cover me, swallow me whole. 

And all the same, I would rather die than be touched by him. I was so afraid of what I’d feel that I’d rather feel nothing than ever do more than brush against him. Better to stick to sheets. But what kind of life would it be, knowing I would die for the touch of his skin but knowing death would come before he ever touched me? 

That was an appealing thought: his hand brushing my cold, dead cheek, where all blood had stilled and motion ceased, with no possibility of my body responding, or giving me away. But he would be touching me just the same. Feeling my thoughts turn towards something so predictable, so Tom Sawyer, as imagining my own funeral, I rolled my eyes and flopped down on my bed, abandoning my college essays. 

It was a moot point, if he was with Aisha anyway. Even if I mustered the courage to hold him, to cup his face in my hands or kiss the lines on the palm of his hand, it wouldn’t matter what I felt if he wasn’t an option.

Still, I couldn’t take much longer in this limbo of my own design, where I was so fixated on staying away from anything that might give me away that I was afraid to go anywhere, or do anything at all. I needed to end this self-imposed exile, abandon my curt responses, my shrugged shoulders, my pretense that I was too busy to accompany him to get smoothies or go swimming. For one thing, I enjoyed his company, and the summer was too short to spend so much time with him out of my sight. For another, I needed to know where things stood with him and Aisha, which meant I could no longer avoid them, separately or together. 

And what if they weren’t together, or if it were just a casual thing? What would I do—what  could I do?Push away what I wanted and turn this summer into an exercise in asceticism and self-denial? Lay in wait forever? Or tell him, and risk him telling everyone? Telling Gladys— or worse, my  _ parents _ ? I was on a narrow strip of safe ground, getting narrower all the time. The only way off was to jump into the rushing cold water beneath: eventually, I’d have to tell someone. And who better to tell than him? Even if he hated it, hated me, or wanted nothing to do with me for the rest of his stay, I knew his understanding would be greater than anyone else’s, because he looked at me the way he did, because he sharpened my pencils for me, because he seemed to know the words I was fiddling with before they took shape. With that in mind, who’s to say he didn’t already know? Or at least suspect? 

So I took the next opportunity to join him on an outing. I woke up early, pretended to read the Fanon paperback Jonathan had loaned me, and waited for him to head out. 

“Oh, hey. You’re up early.”

“Couldn’t sleep.”

He nods towards the book. “Too busy thinking about the plight of the colonized?”

“Something like that. Where are you off to?”

“Library.”

Nice and vague. “Study date?”

He laughed, but looked at me slightly askance. “No, just need to Xerox some pages and get them off to my editor. You want to come with?”

“Sure.” I dog-eared a page, hoping that would add verisimilitude to my fake reading. “I have spare dimes, if you need.” What was that— an attempt at businessman-like impersonality? An attempt to give back to him what he’d given to me? If so, there could hardly be a more fitting representation of what I had to offer— spare change. 

* * *

We took two bikes from the shed, and headed up Seaview Avenue, the water chilling and salting the air around us. We started out slow. 

“I used to count the churches,” I said idly. I wasn’t sure why I was telling him this.

“Hm?” He hadn’t been paying attention, staring dreamily at nothing, at the coolness of the early morning and the frothing of the slate-colored sea. 

“Whenever I rode my bike around here when I was little, I would count the churches. Our Lady of the Sea, Holy Ghost, Catholic Parish…”

“Every one of them ready to tell you their charming stories of hellfire and damnation.” He countered. 

“An afro-pessimist  _ and _ an atheist? Don’t you see the wonder in  _ anything _ ?”

“I see wonder in plenty of things.” He said, suddenly serious, though I’d only been teasing him. 

“Like what? And don’t say French toast,” I said, trying to return the lightness to the conversation. Something about his serious eyes unsettled me, the way he said “wonder” as he looked at me was too strange, too intense, and I found myself, for some reason, revising my plan to tell him the truth.

“I never said I was an atheist, by the way. I’m all too aware that God is watching.” He started to pedal faster. 

My front wheel wobbled as I desperately tried to catch up. The air around us began to whistle and shriek as we picked up speed, too loud for us to speak anymore. I didn’t mind. Just to be with him was enough. It made the rush of riding your bike on a summer’s morning that much better just to see his lungs heaving and his calf muscles pumping, so alive, so beautiful in motion. His loose shorts billowed in the breeze, like the flag of some distant kingdom. 

* * *

We got to the library, and he pulled the rolled-up pages out of his pocket. I took them out of his hands and ran them over my bike’s handlebars to smooth them. He was looking at me in that strange, intense way again. 

Now was the moment. “What did you mean when you said you were too aware that God is watching?”

“You know what I meant.” He looked at me levelly. I  _did_ know, that the reason he didn’t like church, that the reason he feared God’s omnipresent gaze, was because of what he wanted, and how wrong it felt. 

“For what it’s worth, I’m glad God is watching us, together, right now.” There it was. I hadn’t really  _said_ it, not in so many words, but this was the closest to a confession I could manage. 

“Are you saying—?“ I liked how flustered I’d made him. 

“Yes.” Now it was my turn to look at him levelly, devoid of anxiety,  _ just stating the facts.  _

“I still have to—if I go fax these pages, will you still be here when I come back?”

“Always.” I shrugged. If I would wait all my life for you, since before I ever laid eyes on you, since I was born, what was ten more minutes? What was ten more  _lifetimes_,  if I knew I’d have you at the end of it all?

He half-walked, half-jogged to the library’s entrance. I hadn’t realized how tense I was; I let out a pent-up breath. 

When he returned, he fumbled with his backpack, unable to find the straps. I’d never seen him so nakedly unsure, and it endeared him even further to me. 

“Do you mind if we take a detour?” I asked. 


	9. Chapter 9

We biked back east, then I took a sudden turn northward. It thrilled me, to be able to take the lead with him, to leave him trailing in my wake and unsure where we were going.

When we arrived, I let my bike rattle to the ground and took off jogging toward it: the Flying Carousel.

We hopped the low barrier. “I’ve heard of this place.” He said.

“Oldest operational carousel in the country.” I said, placing a hand on the frozen, noble head of a wooden horse. “Over a hundred years old. It still has the original brass rings, and the original manes on the horses.” I knew I was talking only to avoid _really_ talking. But I also knew something about the brass rings, the way you reach for them and inevitably miss because you’re moving too fast and time refuses to stand still, had something to do with him, with us, with what I’d told him.

He stepped up onto the platform, and slowly circled, running his elegant hand over the glossy, honey-colored wood. “Built—what? Ten, twenty years after emancipation?” He shook his head slowly. “Imagine being the first generation after that. And meanwhile, someone was carving these horses.”

“Imagine trying to complain to your parents about anything. Talk about the ultimate trump card.”

It was a stupid, poorly timed joke, but he stopped circling. He grabbed the pole next to him and he laughed, suddenly, like he was surprised by how funny he found it.

“You’re a fucking trip, man.” He smiled at me. “I like talking to you, you know.”

My heart stuttered. _Say it, Malcolm, or live to regret it. _“So are we going to talk, or are we going to fumble around it in the darkness until it’s too late?”

He pushed off the pole, propelling himself until he was nearly toe-to-toe with me. “I already told you.“ He was smiling faintly, but perspiration was beading lightly on his forehead.

“No you haven’t. Not really. Why can’t you say it?”

“Say that I want it?”

“Want _it?_” My mouth was barely moving.

“Want _you_.” He replied, equally quietly. “But I can’t—I haven’t _allowed_ myself to go there. Have you?”

I shook my head.

“Then maybe we should both forget you said anything.”

“So you want to sleep across from each other for the rest of the summer and pretend we don’t know?”

“You’ve been doing it this long, right?”

“I had no idea you—I mean, I didn’t know anything was happening. I thought maybe I’d imagined it.”

“Well, you were wrong,” he shrugged, then idly grabbed for the brass ring, which was well within his reach if he rose up _en rélevé. _

I stepped into the foothold and swung myself up to sit sidesaddle on one of the horses, my legs dangling. “Shouldn’t you at least try it? I don’t even mean with _me_, per se, but don’t you think you have to allow yourself to want what you want?” This was the kind of question I would have expected _him_ to ask, to encourage me to be more like him, more at ease with myself and my body. Had all that ease been a mask? Was he as terrified as me?

He leaned one long, dark arm on the horse’s wooden flank. “Easy for you to say: you’re just a kid,” he said with a baleful expression.

That stung.Perhaps to prove to him I wasn’t just a kid, or perhaps to prove to him he could be carefree as a kid, too, I placed one hand behind his head, leaned down, and kissed him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is a short chapter, so I figured I'd release it right away rather than making y'all wait for a few paragraphs.

**Author's Note:**

> For those who don't know, Oaks Bluff is a historically black community in the wealthy vacation island Martha's Vineyard, off the coast of Massachusetts. 
> 
> The Illumination is an actual thing that happens every year (and there is indeed a singalong) https://mvol.com/grand-illumination/
> 
> The famous gingerbread houses look something like this https://www.countryliving.com/real-estate/news/g3613/marthas-vineyard-gingerbread-houses/?slide=7


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